“Inside The Doomed Conservative Dump-Trump Plot”: Plans For A Consensus 3rd Party Candidate If Trump Is GOP Nominee
A group of powerful conservatives met Thursday to try to hammer out a plan for a potential third-party consensus candidate if Trump becomes the GOP nominee.
The team that brought you Santorum 2016 has decided to stop Trump.
He must be petrified.
For seven hours on Thursday, a few dozen conservative leaders gathered in an upstairs room of the Army Navy Club off K Street in downtown Washington, D.C., to rack their collective brains—but reached no conclusion on how to thwart the billionaire’s rise.
Quin Hillyer, a National Review contributing editor, fielded questions afterward from print reporters and a Chinese camera crew, explaining that the group hoped all the 2016 presidential candidates who haven’t endorsed Trump will coalesce behind a unity ticket. He added that there wasn’t a consensus that conservatives should unite behind Ted Cruz.
“That was not the consensus,” he said, when asked about support for a Cruz-helmed unity ticket. “The consensus was that we need a unity ticket of some sort and we’ll let the candidates work out who the unity ticket is.”
He added that the group hopes someone other than Trump will be the Republican Party’s nominee.
“Obviously a third party or an independent bid is one other option,” he added. “But we didn’t come to any formal plans. We are exploring every option.”
Other attendees—including Bob Fischer, the president of Fischer Furniture in Rapid City, South Dakota, who quickly jumped in an Uber when approached by reporters after the meeting, and Bill Wichterman, a key Santorum booster and a top D.C. lobbyist—declined to talk about the closed-door discussion.
The invitation billed the event as a meeting of “conservative leaders to strategize how to defeat Donald Trump for the Republican nomination, and if he is the Republican nominee for president, to offer a true conservative candidate in the general election.”
A copy of the invitation obtained by The Daily Beast showed it went to people on the email list of a group called Conservatives of Faith—a group that helped give energy to Rick Santorum’s 2016 presidential bid. The group came together in July of 2011 to connect evangelical leaders with presidential hopefuls. It’s loosely affiliated with another, larger group of powerful social conservative leaders called the Council for National Policy—which has endorsed Trump rival Ted Cruz.
The two groups sometimes have concurrent meetings so members can attend both.
Though the group has a history of helping Santorum, Thursday’s meeting wasn’t just a reunion of the former senator’s old advocates.
Conservatives of Faith held one of its first gatherings in August of 2011 at the ranch of Jim Leininger, a wealthy businessman who supports conservative Christian causes and school-choice efforts. Members of the group met at the ranch with Rick Perry and his wife, Anita, at the start of his 2012 presidential campaign.
Fischer, the furniture magnate, is a key organizer of the group. The invitation to Thursday’s meeting instructed respondents to RSVP to him directly. Acquaintances describe Fischer as “thoughtful,” “low-key,” “lovely,” “wonderful,” and capable of managing others’ big egoes. His basic belief, according to sources, is that if enough conservative Christian leaders get together in a room, discuss the issues, pray, and agree upon one battle plan or chosen candidate, that they will be able to accomplish their ends.
It’s an interesting theory. But—fortunately for Trump—it has a poor track record. A few weeks after Obama won re-election in 2012, the Conservatives of Faith group convened at a country club in McLean, Virginia, to gin up enthusiasm for a second Santorum presidential bid.
We all know how that worked out.
And though members of the Council for National Policy backed Cruz, he got schlonged in the evangelical-heavy Southern states where his team had hoped to do well. The fact that Donald Trump beat him by winning the evangelical vote indicates that evangelical Christian leaders—including those in the Council for National Policy and Conservatives of Faith—don’t have as much clout as conventional wisdom might dictate.
Still, it features a number of evangelical power brokers.
Sources estimated that the Conservatives of Faith email list has upwards of 300 names on it. Phyllis Schlafly of Eagle Forum has been involved with the group in the past, but she endorsed Trump this cycle and didn’t attend the meeting on Thursday.
Trump won every state but Ohio on March 15’s Super Tuesday primaries. So today’s effort is just the latest setback for the #NeverTrump movement—an effort that may have come just after the nick of time.
Perhaps as a result, there is reason for skepticism as this latest faction of the Republican Party sets out to try to change the trajectory of the race.
Dennis Stephens, a long-time conservative lobbyist based in D.C. who backs Trump, said the group’s plans aren’t promising.
“Third party equals Hillary Clinton,” he said.
By: Betsy Woodruff, The Daily Beast, March 18, 2016
“No Special-Interest Contributions?”: Will Trump Have To Go On A Fund-Raising Binge If He Wins The GOP Nomination?
One of the big story lines of the presidential cycle is that candidates other than front-runner Donald J. Trump have spent a lot more money on themselves and against him than he’s had to expend, enabling him to pose as the guy too rich (and too popular with small donors) to be vulnerable to “bribery.” This was exemplified by the failed effort by Marco Rubio and an assortment of conservative groups to take down Trump in Florida. Anti-Trump “independent” ads alone in the Sunshine State cost an estimated $35.5 million. Total spending by Trump and his supporters for the entire campaign nationwide is at $25.8 million.
Trump’s difference-maker financially, of course, has been his massive advantage in “earned media” (or what used to be called “free media,” because it’s provided by media coverage free of charge). MediaQuant, a firm that measures and values unpaid media coverage, estimates that Trump has harvested nearly $1.9 billion in earned media this cycle. That’s about twice as much as Ted Cruz, Marco Rubio, John Kasich, and Jeb Bush combined have received, and within shouting distance of being twice as much as the two Democratic candidates combined as well.
But general-election campaigns are a lot more expensive than primaries. So it’s not surprising that Trump has hedged on repeating his “no special-interest contributions” pledge beyond the Republican Convention in July, and CNN is reporting that he’s already planning a big fund-raising blitz for the general election.
At The American Prospect, Eliza Newlin Carney puts all this together and suggests that total campaign costs are about to become too high for Trump to perpetually surf earned media to victory:
So far, Trump has enjoyed an extraordinary political ride, fending off millions worth of hostile attacks, prevailing against opponents who out-organized and outspent him, and sparing himself the punishing grind of high-dollar fundraisers. He’s also gotten considerable political mileage out of his claim to be above the big money fray. It remains to be seen whether Trump can continue playing by his own rules, or whether he will be forced to get his hands dirty in the messy business of campaign financing—and answer for it to voters.
But there are two factors that undercut this possibility. For one thing, Trump could liquidate some of his assets (estimated independently as having a value of about $4.5 billion) and self-finance to a considerable extent. And for another, this long nominating contest season in both parties is shortening the general-election campaign and the time and cost of any “air war.” Additionally, earned media is much easier to come by in presidential general elections than any other mode of politics, sometimes dwarfing paid media even when there’s not a wildly entertaining and galvanizing figure like Donald Trump in the fray. So it might make sense for Trump to wait and see if he even needs to spend a lot of money. At the current trajectory Americans won’t grow totally bored with the wiggy dude until some time well into 2017.
By: Ed Kilgore, Daily Intelligencer, New York Magazine, March 17, 2016
“Another GOP Kamikaze Mission”: #NeverTrump Conservatives Are Fighting For Him To Reshape The Supreme Court
The organizing principle of the #NeverTrump movement isn’t simply that Republicans should deny Donald Trump their presidential nomination, as Marco Rubio has it, but that they should also deny him the presidency should he prevail in the primary.
Some conservatives’ implicit willingness to essentially throw the race for the White House should Trump become their party’s nominee has understandably raised questions about how thoroughgoing and enduring their opposition to him will prove to be. The other Republican candidates are still promising to support Trump in the general election, and presumably some stalwart-seeming #NeverTrumpers will fall into line as well.
Another, better reason to doubt that #NeverTrump is more than a strategic effort to defeat Trump in the primary—rather than in the general election—can be found in the Senate, where #NeverTrump sentiment is about to come into exquisite tension with the Republican Party’s determination to deny President Obama’s Supreme Court nominee a fair hearing.
The tactics #NeverTrump conservatives demand of Senate Republicans are of a piece with the reactionary maximalism that gave rise to the Trump phenomenon in the first place. The person who will determine whether this final act of resistance to Obama will hold together is Iowa’s Chuck Grassley, who chairs the Senate Judiciary Committee, and thus controls whether Obama’s nominee will receive confirmation hearings, fair or otherwise. Grassley faces reelection this year and will likely be running against a formidable Democratic opponent. Obama is reportedly vetting Jane Kelly, an appellate court judge from Iowa whom Grassley has praised effusively in the past. So there’s a great deal of countervailing pressure on Grassley to break ranks from the rest of the GOP—including Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, who holds that the next president should get to fill the vacancy on the Supreme Court.
How is Grassley responding to that pressure? By arguing in essence that not confirming Obama’s nominee is a compromise between liberal forces who want the seat filled according to custom and the forces of reaction that “come to my town meetings and say, ‘Why don’t you impeach those justices?’”
This is a microcosm of the Republican Party’s broader failure to cope with Obama’s presidency—which in turn gave rise to Trump, on whose behalf Grassley will apparently risk his Senate seat, fighting to hold the Supreme Court vacancy open for him. Confronted for seven years with wild-eyed derangement about all things Obama, Republicans have responded by indulging rather than disclaiming it.
Grassley was the most prominent senator to vouchsafe the lie that the Affordable Care Act would contain “death panels.” Four years later, Republicans shut down the government in a show of resistance to the law’s implementation. More recently, Republicans have gotten themselves wrapped around the axle by an anti-Planned Parenthood agitprop campaign, orchestrated by people who are now indicted for tampering with government records.
These episodes of ill-fated intransigence define the Obama-era GOP, and they’ve laid the predicate for Trump to take over the party by promising to be a better fighter. The storylines collide on Capitol Hill, where Republicans, who desperately want to stop Trump, are now effectively united behind the purpose of letting him shape the Supreme Court for a generation.
And just as with the Republicans’ previous kamikaze missions—the government shutdown, the campaign to defund Planned Parenthood—this instance of pandering to reactionaries will also fail spectacularly, when Trump loses the general election in a landslide, and Hillary Clinton fills the open Supreme Court seat with whomever she wants.
By: Brian Beutler, The New Republic, March 14, 2016
“America Is Not A Planet, It’s A Country”: Rubio Is Asked About Climate Change: Ignorance Ensues
I have a hard time imagining a scenario in which Marco Rubio becomes the Republican nominee. That is likely to be completely obvious if he fails to win his home-state primary in Florida on Tuesday. That’s why I’m reluctant to even talk about him. But his performance in last night’s debate has me scratching my head at his ignorance and/or deceit.
Since the beginning, Rubio has been assumed to represent “moderate” Republicans and people have posited that he has a chance of appealing to young people – perhaps simply because of his age. But at last night’s debate, he was finally asked to talk about climate change, something that is of great importance to young people. And it’s hard to overstate how ignorant his response was. For example, how about this whopper:
But as far as a law that we can pass in Washington to change the weather, there’s no such thing.
That misses on so many levels for such a short sentence! Of course there’s “no such thing.” That is why no one is proposing any laws that would attempt to change the weather. Rubio leaves us with a familiar conundrum: is he really stupid enough to think that anyone is actually suggesting that a law can change the weather, or is he merely lying as a way to distract us from the issue at hand? In the end, does it really matter?
Then, in talking about President Obama’s actions to address climate change, Rubio made this statement that might have been relevant several years ago.
You know what impact it would have on the environment? Zero. Because China and India will still be polluting at historic levels.
That Paris climate accord folks like Rubio have been trashing since it was reached…does he even know what is in it? Does he have no idea that China and India have committed to reducing their carbon emissions and will not – in fact – be polluting at historic levels? Again – ignorance or lie? You tell me.
Rubio went on to make the usual Republican claim that Americans have to chose between a habitable planet and a healthy economy – something that is being proven false on a daily basis. But when Jake Tapper asked him to comment directly on whether humans are contributing to climate change, he laid out another whopper.
I would say there’s no law we could pass that would have an impact on that.
I don’t really think that Rubio wants to suggest that laws can’t be passed to affect human behavior. And yet that’s what he just implied.
How about this for a closer:
America is not a planet. It’s a country.
I have no idea what he means by that. Of course, it’s true. It’s like saying, “the sky is blue.” But what does that have to do with what we’re talking about? Nothing.
Watching this exchange I came to one conclusion: if Rubio is any indication, Republicans REALLY don’t want to talk about climate change during this election season. Obfuscate, distract, make meaningless assertions – that is what we’ll see. In the process, they’ll just look ignorant.
By: Nancy LeTourneau, Political Animal Blog, The Washington Monthly, March 11, 2016
“Can Newt Gingrich Save the GOP?”: He’s Trying To Play Peacemaker Between Republicans And The Trump Campaign
The Republican Party’s establishment is slowly coming to terms with a tough reality: Donald Trump will be the nominee, and resistance is futile.
Newt Gingrich is the latest party elder to try and normalize the ever-increasing possibility of a Trump presidency, visiting with top GOP lawmakers on Capitol Hill earlier this week to pave the way for a future working relationship.
“The time is coming when you’ve got to put the party back together,” Gingrich told The Daily Beast.
Asked whether he was meeting with GOP leaders about Trump, Gingrich indicated it was more of a casual conversation—but confirmed that he has spoken with party leadership about starting the healing process—no matter which of the four candidates end up winning the nomination.
Behind the scenes, however, Gingrich’s outreach is more obvious. None of the other remaining Republican nominees would require the kind of healing that a Trump presidency would demand.
“Newt has been on the Hill sharing his views on how Congress could work with a Trump administration,” a Republican leadership aide told The Daily Beast. “Gingrich is trying to legitimize Trump while Mitt Romney and others are out there saying he’s terrible. Gingrich is saying that Trump’s positions are valid—he’s trying to add legitimacy to Trump while everyone else is doing the opposite.”
Gingrich visited Capitol Hill on Wednesday to sit down with Speaker Ryan and hold a Facebook Q&A. Just the day before, Gingrich waxed poetic about Trump’s “seriousness” and “shift toward inclusiveness” following the Super Tuesday primaries.
Trump’s shift toward inclusiveness, team effort and unity was vitally important. He has to build a Reagan like inclusiveness to win this fall
— Newt Gingrich (@newtgingrich) March 2, 2016
Trump’s decision to hold a serious press conference instead of a campaign speech was masterful and a great contrast to Cruz and Rubio.
— Newt Gingrich (@newtgingrich) March 2, 2016
During one meeting, a leadership aide said, Gingrich said he had been in quiet talks with the Trump campaign.
But Gingrich has stopped “short of endorsing Trump publicly because he knows it’s not the right way to win over conservatives who are alarmed by Trump’s policy positions and rhetoric,” said the aide.
Publicly Gingrich has walked a fine line: praising Trump without quite endorsing him.
“He is a man totally unique. He lives life at a 100 percent pace. I have never seen anything like it,” Gingrich cooed on Fox News Thursday evening. “If he becomes president, there is going to be a wall.”
The former House speaker added, “I don’t mind people saying, ‘I don’t want Trump.’ I mind people saying, ‘I’ll never vote for him.’ I think faced with Hillary [Clinton] as an alternative, that’s a very dangerous position.”
Trump was right to skip CPAC. The votes are in Kansas not Washington. Why give the anti-trump activists a target
— Newt Gingrich (@newtgingrich) March 4, 2016
Gingrich is hardly the only Republican leader, in recent weeks, to make peace with the idea of Donald Trump as the party’s nominee.
“There is so much at stake… however you disagree with Cruz or Rubio or Trump, the moderate Republican Party is going to coalesce against Hillary. She’s the uniter not a divider, she’s going to unite the Republican Party,” Grover Norquist, the anti-tax crusader, told The Daily Beast. “There were a number of significant Republicans who came out against Goldwater, there were people that talked about doing this against Reagan, but I don’t know that anybody significant did it after the primary.”
By: Jackie Kucinich and Tim Mak, The Daily Beast, March 4, 2016
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